Robert Graves. (1895-1985)
Robert von Ranke Graves was
born in Wimbledon on July 24, 1895, the middle child of his father's second family
of five. Graves's father already had five children from his marriage to his
first wife (who had died of consumption (TB) in 1886). Graves began to write
poetry while still at Charterhouse School. He was encouraged in this by one of
his master's at Charterhouse, the mountaineer, George Mallory, and also by Edward Marsh (who also encouraged Siegfried Sassoon). When war broke out, Graves joined the Royal
Welch Fusiliers. He got to know Siegfried Sassoon while serving out in France.
The two became firm friends and spent hours discussing poetry and what they
would do after the War. Graves had written some realistic poetry about the War,
which he showed to Sassoon early in their friendship. At that point Sassoon was
still writing chivalric war poetry and he disapproved of the realism of
Graves's war poetry, rather ironically in light of the fact that Graves was later
to bemoan the gloominess of Sassoon's and Owen's poetry. Whilst serving in France Graves was
badly wounded and mistakenly reported dead. Sassoon was very upset and wrote a
poem about the loss of his friend, To His Dead Body. Sassoon and Graves
also wrote verse letters to each other, although one of these helped to cause
the breakdown of their friendship. Before that however, Graves became known as
one of the war poets with his first collection of poetry Over the Brazier
published in 1916. He later suppressed his war poetry, feeling that it was not
of the calibre of either Sassoon or Owen.
Graves was influential in
saving Sassoon from a court-martial, following the latter's protest against the continuation of the War. Despite
being on the Isle of Wight convalescing, Graves got himself pronounced fit and
travelled in haste to Liverpool in the hope of talking Sassoon out of his
protest. Fortunately for Sassoon and poetry, Graves prevailed - by lying to
Sassoon and saying that the Major of the Royal Welch Fusiliers would not allow
Sassoon to be court-martialled, and that Sassoon would be locked up in a
madhouse for the duration of the War as one mentally unfit for further service.
Graves's lie succeeded and Sassoon was soon en route to Craiglockhart, with
Graves, as his escort, following several hours behind owing to the fact that
he'd missed the train !
Shortly after this Graves
married Nancy Nicholson, daughter of the painter William Nicholson, and sister
of the painter Ben Nicholson. After being invalided out of the war Graves went
up to St John's College, Oxford, where one of his tutors was Percy Simpson,
whose Shakespearean Punctuation influenced Graves's and Laura Riding's
analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 in their Survey of Modernist Poetry
(1927).
Graves's poetry appeared
regularly in Marsh's Georgian Poetry anthologies, but by 1922 it had
become apparent that, although traditional in form - as indeed it always
remained - Graves's poetry was by no means typically Georgian. Early in his
career Graves wrote in complex experimental schemes, often derived from Welsh prosody; his poetry heavily depended on both nursery
rhyme and ballad, and explored his feelings of guilt on lines
heavily influenced by Freud (as is made clear in his critical study Poetic
Unreason). In 1925 Graves met the American poet Laura Riding, and from that
time both his attitude and his style changed. Graves was less affected by
Riding's poetic procedures, which he never sought to imitate, than he was by
her unique personality and by the fact that he was in love with her, and by her
major role in relieving him from the post-war trauma (or neurasthenia as
it was then called) that he was still suffering. Graves began, at this point,
to distrust everything that had been imposed upon him by convention, and to
defend some aspects of modernism. So far did Graves go in defying
convention, Riding moved in with the family, even going to Egypt with the
family during Graves's inopportune tenure of a lecturing post at the
university. Graves's poetry became a means of self-critical exploration of his
own psyche. Riding became the muse to whom he submitted all his work for
judgement, and his belief in her powers was, for many years, absolute. After a
scandal involving Riding's attempted suicide, Graves and Riding moved to
Majorca (1929-1936), where they carried on with publishing activities on their
Seizin Press (mostly they published their own work, although they also
published work by Gertrude Stein, James Reeves and others), and issued three
volumes of the miscellany Epilogue. In 1929, desperate for money and disillusioned
with England, Graves wrote his autobiography, Goodbye to all That. The publication of this book lead to
a series of angry letters being exchanged between Graves and Sassoon. Sassoon
objected to the many inaccuracies in Graves's book; to his use of Sassoon's
verse letter A Letter Home, which Graves had reproduced without
permission, and to Graves's recording of a visit he had made to Sassoon's home,
which was demeaning to Sassoon's mother, Theresa. Goodbye to all That
led to the breakdown of the friendship between the two men - a friendship
already breached by Graves's marriage to Nancy Nicholson. Graves and Riding
returned to England at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, and then went to
America, where Graves parted company from Riding.
The experience of Riding
soon became the basis for Graves's "historical grammar of poetic
myth", The White Goddess (1948). Graves was a gifted translator
from the classics (Apuleius's The Golden Ass (1950), and others), a
powerful historical novelist (I, Claudius (1934) and many others), and a
stimulating, but unreliable critic. Much of the best of his criticism was done
with Riding; the rest is collected in The Common Asphodel (1949).
http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/graves.htm